by Lori Power
It seemed an endless struggle. Vivian’s limbs wouldn’t cooperate cold and numb as they were. Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to scissor kick to the buoy. She had one shoe on while the other foot was bare. She pried the other shoe free with a final farewell for fashion in order to achieve better mobility, but she still wasn’t making any headway. She grew eternally frightened that she would suddenly be flung away from the buoy by a rogue wave. Frustrated, Vivian splashed her arms in a forward motion, encumbered though they were by the bulkiness of the lifejacket, toward the sound.
Clang, clang, clang. The sound was getting closer. With renewed vigor, Vivian waded forward until she quite literally bumped into the buoy. The buoy was significantly bigger than she imagined. Somehow buoys, in the imagination of the masses, are small dots in the ocean, like markers on a map. But this buoy was larger than any good size SUV, if not a truck. More like a floating shed, except of course, she couldn’t go inside. It seemed to be completely solid.
Ignoring the darkness of the night and the rain pelting down, Vivian ran her icy hands over the surface searching for a handhold. Relief warmed her that she was no longer being flung under the water, but she needed to stay connected with the buoy. For the first time since being deposited in the ocean, she grew more optimistic and alert by the moment. An adrenaline rush flowed through her veins, giving her renewed energy.
Legs in constant motion to keep her in place, Vivian continued to run her hands along the surface as she bobbed around the edge, searching for something, anything to hold on to. Panic made her strong. I can’t let the waves grab me and pull me under. I don’t have the strength to go through that again. Her mind registered on an old saying of when you were lost, stand still and someone would find you. This buoy would enable her to stop drifting and increase the chances of someone finding her.
Nate’s lessons flashed through her mind, registering what she had considered meaningless information now quite significant. “A weather buoy is basically a weather station set strategically at sea to monitor currents, ocean temperatures, and wave heights,” he had said as they reviewed the instruments on board the Navigator. “Scientists monitor these stations and report on an anomalies and weather changes. Anything and everything.”
If I can just get myself out of this freezing water, someone might find me. Vivian continued to run her hands along the surface, feeling her way. She was sure there would be handholds, if not a ladder, and then suddenly she found it—a ladder.
Hoisting her soggy weight up the ladder took several attempts, each ending with her splashing back down into the cold depths, sputtering to the surface again and again. When she was finally up a couple of steps, she paused for breath. Vivian counted how many steps she had climbed, just to focus her mind. Six.
Would search and rescue be looking for her? If nothing else, they would search for her body. Would Tuck be on board? In a storm like this surely he would be called out. How devastating for him to have to his family in peril.
She hoped the crew on the Navigator had come through the worst of the storm? With Captain MacLean at the helm, she was sure they would.
Had Nate gotten out of the water? Yes, he had. She had to believe he did.
Would Tuck miss her if she was lost to the sea? There was something something special between her and Tuck. He touched his heart and waved as she left. He touched his heart. I touched his heart. Is that what he was saying through the gesture?
Clinging to latter, her life on the line, Vivian’s very soul was stripped bare, leaving no room for pretense in her situation. She understood beyond a doubt that she had been given something rare with Tuck. That kind of connection had to be mutual, right? It has to be. The thought of Tuck gave her the will to keep hanging on as a wave threatened to disarm her from her present location. The wave passed and she hoisted up another step, agony traveling through the soles of her frozen bare feet to the top of her legs.
Where are you, Tuck? I’m here. Please find me.
The beacon attached to her lifejacket was long since lost with the battering of the water. Bitterness filled her as she glanced down at the place where the emergency light had been striving to cope. Even with the never-ending pain, she continued her climb. Reaching to top, she had found salvation. Now, she just needed someone to find her.
Vivian wrapped her icy fingertips around the ladder to lock her elbows so she encircled the contraption. She had to cope with her feet slipping, but she had a firm hold with her arms as she bent over the top of the clanging bell. Exhausted, she laid her head to rest in the hollow created by her arms. Finally rest.
Clang, clang, clang. The reverberating of the clanging bell couldn’t force her to keep her eyes open any longer. She dreamed of Tuck. They were on his small sloop making love, and enjoying the warm breeze and sunshine on their naked bodies. Her body registered heat, warmer than she had been since entering the cold ocean. She quaked with spasms of shivers, but her back did feel warm. Imagination was a wonderful thing. Is this a result of hypothermia?
She tried to lift her head, and then gave up. How long had she been out? She had no idea. Did it matter? I’ll just rest a bit longer.
With all loss of time, her eyes fluttered again. She couldn’t feel her arms. That couldn’t be good. They were locked around the buoy’s ladder. She eased her gripping fingers, flexing them to bring back a painful circulation. She tilted her head. The sun, high in the sky, warmed her skin as she continued to clutch the wide bars. Most of her body, except for her knees down, was fortunately out of the water. Vivian ached all over. The bars were digging into the cleft of her elbow were she held in a bear hug. The sun feels good, but I’m parched. Her tongue was glued to the roof of her mouth and her lips were caked with dried salt from the water. Easing her tongue out of her mouth, she could feel a wide crack in the middle of her bottom lip.
Cautiously, regaining sensation in her hand, she lifted her fingers to her face, to scratch the salty crust from her eyelashes. She glanced around her. The sea still roiled as though angry, but smoldered as the minutes passed. The ocean was vibrant in its overwhelming energy. The sky cleared with not a cloud to be seen directly overhead. She stared to the horizon. Her momentary elation of the surrounding beauty shattered as she peered to the distance where she saw the blue-grey of the storm approaching.
The buoy was a bright yellow with orange rings and metal surrounding the bell with a light at the top powered by solar energy. Dressed in beige pants, stretched and tattered, they hung off her slender hips. Her grey, wool sweater was soggy and covered by her orange lifejacket. Would she be visible to planes or helicopters searching for her? She had nothing, no flares to signal a rescue. How can I possibly alert anyone I’m here?
As light as the breeze was that blew over her, Vivian’s whole body shook with tremors that started at the soles of her feet and worked their way up her entire body. Her tired brain tried to remember all she knew about hypothermia. Step one, conserve heat. She had to get out of the water. She brought her legs up to her chest to warm her core. With her legs out of the water, she lost her perilous balance atop of the buoy and before she could catch hold of a step, she fell back into the ocean. Expending energy she didn’t have, and now freshly drenched, she dragged her body back to her perch.
Damn! So much for that. Dripping and colder than she had been before her dunk in the sea, she gazed to the horizon, becoming increasingly fearful of the approaching wall of terror.
Tentatively wiping the water out of her eyes with the tips of shaking fingers, Vivian noticed the sea begin to boil again. The waves lapping along the edge of the buoy were getting higher still. The water was rising. Rising fast! Where just moments ago only her knees were submerged, the waves now washed her back.
Oh, God, no. She prayed, seeing nothing but the vast expanse of ocean stretching forever in every direction. The wall of black closed in from all sides. I really can’t do this again. Losing hope, Vivian hung her head toward her chest as great wracking sobs she di
dn’t think she had the fortitude to produce, escaped her cracked and newly bleeding lips.
At first, she had mistakenly thought the storm approached from only one direction, but when realization dawned that she lay in the eye of the tempest, her faith shattered. The temporary respite was coming to an end. She had nothing to hold her to this buoy except the failing strength in her arms.
She lifted her head to glance around. Think. There has to be something. Her vision returned to the top of buoy.
As the first waves started to wash over her completely, setting the buoy lean this way and that, she was paralyzed. The current tipped the structure sideways, immersing her in the ocean and bobbing back up with the floating beacon. As the light at the top of buoy dipped into the sea, she accepted the waves that bathed her. I know what I have to do.
Chapter Thirteen
The Expedition found the Navigator and waited for the tug to arrive to assist the ship back to shore. Then the Expedition would join the search for Vivian. Three other ships had also sent out an SOS so the Coast Guard was busy.
Tuck’s partner swimmers dove into the water. They rescued a sailor overboard, hanging on to pieces of his splintered fifteen-footer. The man tried to fight the rescue swimmer, which happened more often than not. People panicked as the cold shock of the water and fear overtook them. The sailor, being so frantic, he didn’t know what he was doing. Tuck sat, ready to go into the water to help his comrade, but the swimmer had the situation well in hand as he turned the man in a standard head lock to save the sailor’s life.
The next mission involved swimming to a trawler in distress, and ascertains that all souls were stable and waiting for a rescue ship. Tuck had to administer first aid to a deck hand and hoisted the man in the basket to return him safely to shore. A happy ending for all lives on board.
The Hercules then returned for refueling and set out again, all the while trying to locate Vivian. Tuck was beside himself with anxiety. I can’t stand the thought of her in that black barren water fighting for her life. I can’t bear not finding her. What if I never see her again? He simply would not consider not finding Vivian. She had to survive. He couldn’t consider anything else.
Through the long night and into the day, the still hadn’t found her. Tuck was becoming desperate. Convinced the coordinates his father had provided no longer applied, he gathered the charts. The Navigator had been thrown well off course with the hellish waves. It stood to reason a woman awash at sea would travel as far as a cork in raging, roiling water.
I can’t give up on her! Tuck placed his head in his hands. I won’t!
As twilight approached and the search had been ongoing for twenty-four hours, the possibility of finding Vivian alive diminished rapidly by every minute that passed.
****
Clang, clang, clang.
A weather buoy. Vivian was surprised her brain still functioned.
When she first found the clanging beast, she remembered thinking it was a weather buoy, but dismissed the information as meaningless. For she had found salvation, however temporary, a weather buoy meant that someone, somewhere was monitoring the information sent by this big hunk of steel. In a storm like this, information matters. All buoys within the storm’s circumference would be monitored to track the progress of the hurricane.
Vivian recalled Randy’s add on lecture to Nate’s explanation on the importance of buoys while navigating the sea. “The buoys out here measure air pressure, air temperature, sea surface temperature, wind observations, and the wave height.”
The wave heights increased again. With nothing but the waning strength of her arms holding her to this buoy, she didn’t think she would be able to survive the increasing persistency of the wave potency.
How in the hell had she even got into this trouble? Her longing for adventure, but this was not an adventure. This was life and death. Her life…or possibly her death in the next few hours as Vivian was convinced by the appearance of the wall of weather coming her way that she would not survive another few hours of bobbing in the sea, never mind the exposure, or lack of water.
She had to interfere with the signal the buoy was sending. The only way to capture anyone’s attention was to interfere with the transmission of information. Someone wanted the information this big baby sends and if they didn’t get it, they’d wonder why. With her heart in her throat, watching lightning dance along the wall of the eye, Vivian shimmied up the buoy’s wire cage to the light and the housing protecting the mechanical workings of the machine. This is where my experience with repairing old junk may come in handy.
****
The pilot walked toward Tuck with two steaming mugs of coffee. “Tuck, man,” he said, handing him a cup. “I don’t know. The eye is passing through and the other side seems worse than what we just went through.”
“We never give up, man. Never.”
“No, we don’t give up, but we also don’t chase lost causes in this shit. We don’t unnecessarily risk more lives. People depend on us being there.”
“She’s out there. I can feel it.” Tuck inspected the map again, striving to chart where in the ocean Vivian may be. A large, red X marked where the Navigator had been intercepted. There was another where Nate and Vivian went into the water. Tuck needed to factor in the direction of the wind and the waves to come to a hypothesis on where Vivian may have drifted over the course of the last twenty-four hours.
“Your own brother saw her go down with the mast and rigging. Nate said she was all caught up in the ropes. You and I both know that the likelihood of someone even surfacing after death is rare when a body is caught in the rigging. The way this sea is operating, Vivian is lost to us. I’m sorry to have to be the one to say it, man, she’s gone.”
No! Tuck wouldn’t believe it. How could he tell the pilot that he could feel Vivian calling to him for help—that she was out there? They’d kick him off the squad and then where would he be? So he returned to his bench to sit resolute. As the pilot walked away, Tuck covered his face in his hands. How could I lose someone when I barely had time to understand she is the one? He lifted his face from his hands, tiling his head back to breathe deeply, staring at the florescent lights above. I won’t believe it. When she is gone, I will know and I know she isn’t gone. Not yet. Vivian was strong and he had to be strong for her.
Tears rolled down his face unashamed.
Physically exhausted from his recent missions of the last day, Tuck was mentally drained as well. The sea charts were rolled in his hands, held in a death grip as he fell into a fitful sleep on the bench, waiting for the next call to come through.
He pictured see her face. As soon as he closed his eyes, he could see her alight with the wonder of sailing his small sloop. Tuck marveled at the passion in her eyes, the expressions on her face clearly giving away her every emotion. She wore her heart on her sleeve as though she had never been schooled in the art of a poker face. Then his vision brought her to him and they were making love. Tuck smiled in his fitful sleep. As she drew him inside her, he gloried in being surrounded by her, and the fit of his body to hers. The seamless harmony of two bodies joined the way that they should.
He woke up with a start. “No!” Tuck scrubbed his hands over his face, the bristle of his unshaven face scratching across the palms of his hands. “You’re not gone.”
Tuck had never come this close to completeness before with a woman to lose it. One way or another he was heading back out there. He wouldn’t stop until he had found her. He had to know one way or another, for as long as there was no sign, there would still be hope that she was out there…somewhere.
Tuck went back to the charting table to roll out to his maps, studying the readings, making notes of where Vivian and Nate went overboard, and where the Navigator was when the Expedition arrived. Using the information provided on their last run, he drew concentric circles around both sets of coordinates, plotted the areas they already searched, and the buoy locations. He would check with the Expedition’s
engineers to see what activity had been reported from the buoys within his search module to verify the storm’s progress to decide where they would next concentrate their search efforts.
Naval officer, Innis, provided the information Tuck required when he pointed to one of the buoys he charted on his map.
“Buoy four-four-zero-one-one located at forty-one, point one degrees north, sixty-six, point six degrees west has no readings, sir.” Innis pushed his glasses up his nose, his hand continuing to scratch his well messed hair.
“Nothing?” Tuck yawned, pulling his mind into full alert. Bending close to the screen to see better, he said. “What do you mean nothing?”
“Likely the storm caused some damage, sir. We’ll notify Marine after the storm abates. They’ll send a scientific crew out for repair.”
“When did it last send signal?” Tuck body grew tense.
Innis paused, reading the monitor. “That’s funny. This is unusual, sir.” Innis tapped his screen as though willing the machinery to cooperate. “Up until just about an hour ago. I see here, by its position and the information we have from Marine, that it should now be dead center of the eye. Just like that, it has stopped sending signals. The last reporting had a maximum sustained winds of forty-nine knots with gusts to sixty-five knots and a significant wave height of thirty-nine fee, but that was just as the storm was abating in that area according to the satellite.”
“You’re saying it’s not transmitting now?” Tuck ran both hands through his hair. “When it was in the eye? What would have thrown it out?”
“That’s what’s so weird, sir.” Innis shook his head, tapping on the keyboard. “Last report shows pressure, wave height and temperature, and then nothing.”
Freakish enough to mean something? That needle in the haystack to cause pause, and Tuck grabbed on for all it was worth. It was Vivian! She had told him that she loved to tinker with junk. She had to be responsible for this. It was worth investigating. She knows how things work, and she’d certainly know how to break something. What better signal than no signal at all?